Pamphlets are an important source of knowledge in all fields. No first-class library is without them. Most of them become difficult to obtain, and some bring higher prices than whole sets of books. Of numerous pamphlets pertaining to the range, only a few are listed here. History of the Chisum War, or Life of Ike Fridge, by Ike Fridge, Electra, Texas (undated), is as compact as jerked beef and as laconic as conversation in alkali dust. James F. Hinkle, in his Early Days of a Cowboy on the Pecos, Roswell, New Mexico, 1937, says: "One noticeable characteristic of the cowpunchers was that they did not talk much." Some people don't have to talk to say plenty. Hinkle was one of them. At a reunion of trail drivers in San Antonio in October, 1928, Fred S. Millard showed me his laboriously written reminiscences. He wanted them printed. I introduced him to J. Marvin Hunter of Bandera, Texas, publisher of Frontier Times. I told Hunter not to ruin the English by trying to correct it, as he had processed many of the earth-born reminiscences in The Trail Drivers of Texas. He printed Millard's A Cowpuncher of the Pecos in pamphlet form shortly thereafter. It begins: "This is a piece I wrote for the Trail Drivers." They would understand some things on which he was not explicit.
About 1940, as he told me, Bob Beverly of Lovington, New Mexico, made a contract with the proprietor of the town's weekly newspaper to print his reminiscences. By the time the contractor had set eighty-seven pages of type he saw that he would lose money if he set any more. He gave Bob Beverly back more manuscript than he had used and stapled a pamphlet entitled Hobo of the Rangeland. The philosophy in it is more interesting to me than the incidents. "The cowboy of the old West worked in a land that seemed to be grieving over something—a kind of sadness, loneliness in a deathly quiet. One not acquainted with the plains could not understand what effect it had on the mind. It produced a heartache and a sense of exile."
Crudely printed, but printed as the author talked, is The End of the Long Horn Trail, by A. P. (Ott) Black, Selfridge, North Dakota (August, 1939). As I know from a letter from his compadre, Black was blind and sixty-nine years old when he dictated his memoirs to a college graduate who had sense enough to retain the flavor. Black's history is badly botched, but reading him is like listening. "It took two coons and an alligator to spend the summer on that cotton plantation.... Cowpunchers were superstitious about owls. One who rode into my camp one night had killed a man somewhere and was on the dodge. He was lying down by the side of the campfire when an owl flew over into some hackberry trees close by and started hooting. He got up from there right now, got his horse in, saddled up and rode off into the night."
John Alley is—or was—a teacher. His Memories of Roundup Days, University of Oklahoma Press, 1934 (just twenty small pages), is an appraisal of range men, a criticism of life seldom found in old-timers who look back. On the other hand, some pamphlets prized by collectors had as well not have been written. Here is the full title of an example: An Aged Wanderer, A Life Sketch of J. M. Parker, A Cowboy of the Western Plains in the Early Days. "Price 40 cents. Headquarters, Elkhorn Wagon Yard, San Angelo, Texas." It was printed about 1923. When Parker wrote it he was senile, and there is no evidence that he was ever possessed of intelligence. The itching to get into print does not guarantee that the itcher has anything worth printing.
Some of the best reminiscences have been pried out of range men. In 1914 the Wyoming Stock Growers Association resolved a Historical Commission into existence. A committee was appointed and, naturally, one man did the work. In 1923 a fifty-five-page pamphlet entitled Letters from Old Friends and Members of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association was printed at Cheyenne. It is made up of unusually informing and pungent recollections by intelligent cowmen.
22. Cowboy Songs and Other Ballads
{illust. Lyrics = Kind friends, if you will listen, A story I will tell A-bout a final bust-up, That happened down in Dell.}
COWBOY SONGS and ballads are generally ranked alongside Negro spirituals as being the most important of America's contributions to folk song. As compared with the old English and Scottish ballads, the cowboy and all other ballads of the American frontiers generally sound cheap and shoddy. Since John A. Lomax brought out his collection in 1910, cowboy songs have found their way into scores of songbooks, have been recorded on hundreds of records, and have been popularized, often—and naturally—without any semblance to cowboy style, by thousands of radio singers. Two general anthologies are recommended especially for the cowboy songs they contain: American Ballads and Folk Songs, by John A. and Alan Lomax, Macmillan, New York, 1934; The American Songbag, by Carl Sandburg, Harcourt, Brace, New York, 1927.
LARRIN, MARGARET. Singing Cowboy (with music), New York, 1931. OP.